In My Life

After reading an article on bit-tech about how we first got hooked into gaming, I wanted to share my experience.

A Gameboy was probably where I first played a game. At the time I was probably playing Tetris or Super Mario Land. Then soon afterwards I got a Game Gear. I had one of those cartridges that contained more than one game. There was a Ninja Gaiden game, a Jet Fighter game, and other stuff I don’t remember anymore. While these were great games and I had fun playing them, I wouldn’t consider myself a gamer yet.

When I moved to the US from Hong Kong, I remember playing on an Apple Mac. I have since forgotten what system it was, but it had several games on those huge floppy discs, either an 8-inch or a 5.25-inch floppy. The most memorable game I played was actually a Winter Olympics game; the most memorable being this ski jump game.

Civilization was the next game I remember playing. My brother bought it one day, and I remember seeing it for the first time. I was so impressed with the graphics, even though by today’s standards it’s nothing. It only had icons, but I remember being really impressed.

The next phase was when my brother bought a new computer and I got his old one. I celebrated it by buying myself a game: NBA Live 96. I remember that my computer barely ran it fast enough! It was missing various players I believe, especially Michael Jordan (who didn’t appear till Live 2000).

The final phase that made me a gamer was the next game. I bought it on my birthday and it was The LucasArts Archives Vol. I, a collection of LucasArts games. Included were: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle, Sam & Max: Hit the Road, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Star Wars Screen Entertainment, and Star Wars: Rebel Assault (3 level demo). Also included was a LucasArts Super Sampler disc featuring: Full Throttle, Star Wars: Dark Forces, Star Wars: Rebel Assault II: The Hidden Empire, and Star Wars: TIE Fighter. It established in my mind what a great computer game was and I’ve never looked back since.

After that, I played various other computer games, and a few console games as well. I also read PC Gamer magazine to catch up on the latest games. By now I was a gamer, for I realized that it is such a great medium with all the experiences of the movies only with user interaction involved. That’s possibly why I like original games, I want to try out all the games that break the mold because we have so much to discover about what makes a game fun.

What follows are a few of my favorite games.

• Monkey Island
• Sam & Max: Hit the Road
• Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis
• Grim Fandango
• No One Lives Forever (1 and 2)
• Portal

That’s a short list of the most memorable, I’ve liked more but those are what I remember. Hopefully Spore will be on that list soon! I look forward to all the games I’ll come to love in the future.

Link: reCAPTCHA

We’ve all seen CAPTCHA before on the net, those little distorted words used to confirm that we’re in fact human. reCAPTCHA takes this idea and adds the usefulness by making everyone read old books one word at a time. Intrigued? Here’s why it’s being done and how it works:

In order for the internet to truly be the “information superhighway” several projects are currently actively digitizing text written before the digital age. Pages of text are scanned into the computer and a computer program using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR) figures out what the letters are. The problem with OCR is that computers can’t read text as well as humans can, so the resulting words are typo-prone.

reCAPTCHA makes humans do the work that only humans can do, read distorted but readable text. Instead of just a random arbitrary distorted word to confirm we’re human, we are given a word that computers can’t read and one word that some other human have already read. Each reCAPTCHA we do helps take another step to fully digitizing these books. You can find more information on the reCAPTCHA home page.

Recently Winamp unveiled a new beta version that includes a brand new skin. This new skin incorporates everything that Winamp has and also album artwork too. I gave it a try today and while I think it is an improvement, they still have a long way to go.

Above: The new Bento skin incorporates all aspects of Winamp into one neat package. (click to see entire picture)

Maybe I’m just used to the stable betas of Google’s Gmail and various other software, but almost everything I did with this new Winamp crashed it. Playing a song with the Now Playing tab on crashed it. Clicking on a song in the Media Library crashed it. I’ll wait until it comes out of beta before I will do more testing on it. Right now I just can’t stand it.

If you ever tried to install an extension in Firefox you’ve encountered the warning that a site is trying to install software on your computer.

Above: A warning bar shows up in Firefox when you click on a link to install a Firefox extension.

There is a simple way to bypass this. However, I should forewarn you that this prevention system was put in place for a good reason. Extensions could possibly be a security risk, be very careful when installing extensions from sites you don’t know.

With that warning out of the way I’ll explain how to bypass it.

1. Copy the link. (It has to be a link to the actual xpi.)
2. Paste it in the location bar. (The bar where you enter the url.)
3. Hit Enter.

Now it should bypass the warning bar but it will still ask you to confirm the install. I know that there is a way to turn off said warning bar, but I like it on just in case. I use this whenever I have an extension I know I can trust and I don’t want to whitelist the entire site.

I haven't posted in a while due to laziness. It happens. However, soon I hope to post a few reviews of things I've used lately. Lookout for them and a final Wordpress theme, because as you can see, right now lots of things are broken.